LINGUIST List 16.923

Sat Mar 26 2005

Review: Historical Ling/Typology: Fischer et al. (2004)

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

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Date: 25-Mar-2005 From: Claus Pusch <puschuni-freiburg.de>Subject: Up and down the Cline - The Nature of Grammaticalization

EDITORS: Fischer, Olga; Norde, Muriel; Perridon, Harry TITLE: Up and down the Cline SUBTITLE: The Nature of Grammaticalization SERIES: Typological Studies in Language PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2004 Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1897.html

This book contains a selection of papers originally presented at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization II Conference organized by the volume's editors in 2002 at Amsterdam University (Netherlands). The NRG-II conference was a follow-up meeting to a first New Reflections on Grammaticalization conference held at the University of Potsdam (Germany) in 1999 (the proceedings of which are found in Wischer & Diewald eds. 2002). The third conference of this series is going to be hosted by the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in July 2005, for which, according to one of the organizers, a tremendous number of abstracts has been sent in, testifying the ever increasing interest in the concept of grammaticalization and related processes in the linguistic research community. An equally impressive indication of this interest in grammaticalization and of the broad range of languages and subjects studied under this perspective, is the present book which, in addition to an introductory chapter by the editors, contains 17 contributions, four of which focus on English, two on Romance languages, three on Finnish and Baltic languages, one on Greek, whereas four papers discuss language facts found in Eastern and South-Eastern Asian languages and the remaining papers either deal with other languages or do not have a focus on a specific language or language group.

Following the editors' introductory chapter, the volume opens with Martin Haspelmath's paper "On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization" in which the author maintains that the unidirectionality hypothesis as formulated in classic work on grammaticalization such as Lehmann (1995 [1982]) and Hopper & Traugott (1993) continues to be valid and important in order to understand language change in large samples of the world's languages. Haspelmath acknowledges that there are examples contradicting an absolute reading of the unidirectionality hypothesis but believes that unidirectionality as a 'statistical' universal is not affected by these isolated counter-examples, which are by far outnumbered by the cases of language change where unidirectionality holds true. Moreover, Haspelmath considers the phenomena described as degrammaticalization as too heterogeneous to be covered by a unified term. He suggests a differentiated view and terminology, considering as valid counterexample to unidirectionality only a process "that leads from the endpoint to the starting point of a potential grammaticalization and also shows the same intermediate stages" (p.27s). Such cases of "antigrammaticalization", as he coins them, are extremely rare. Other cases such as "retractions" (another term suggested by Haspelmath), where an advanced stage of a grammaticalization chain becomes obsolete but a still existing previous ("layered") stage survives, are rejected by the author as counterevidence to unidirectionality.

In his paper "Rescuing traditional (historical) linguistics from grammaticalization theory", Brian D. Joseph takes a critical stand concerning the usefulness and methodological soundness of research on language change carried out within the grammaticalization framework. Comparing this research with traditional diachronic linguistics, Joseph criticizes the - as he puts it - sometimes superficial analyses of historical stages and facts by adepts of the grammaticalization approach, who tend to privilege cross- linguistic, typologically-oriented generalization over the careful study of individual cases and let themselves lead to easily to posit historical and functional links on the mere basis of the similarity of form. For the author this qualifies as "an ahistorical approach that often bypasses crucial considerations needed to make historical accounts work." (p. 54)

Anette Rosenbach analyzes "The English s-genitive" and asks if it really constitutes - as frequently claimed - "A case of degrammaticalization?". Her answer to this question is negative insofar as the possessive 's is not stepping back on the clitic to inflectional affix cline and therefore - according to Rosenbach - is not an instance of antigrammaticalization as defined in Haspelmath's contribution. Cautious examination of textual data from Middle, early Modern and Modern English leads the author to conclude that the development of possessive 's is connected to other changes that have affected the English noun phrase and that the (former) inflectional affix has acquired a new status as a definite determiner, a process "which made POSS 's change track and leave the grammaticality cline and become part of the newly emerging article system" (p. 87). Therefore, what looks like degrammaticalization (or antigrammaticalization) on the token level is, in reality, an embarking on a new cline of change, i.e. a continuing grammaticalization on the type level. Like Rosenbach, Martine Taeymans takes "A corpus-based approach" in her "Investigation into the marginal modals DARE and NEED in British present-day English", but uses frequency counts to elucidate the oscillation of these verbs between main verb and modal status. As far as 'need' is concerned, she arrives at the conclusion that "while NEED structurally violates the unidirectionality hypothesis, it does not seem to show a reverse semantic shift" (p. 111), i.e. unidirectionality is preserved on a semantic if not on a structural level.

The idea of defining unidirectionality in grammaticalization primarily on the semantic level instead of the levels of structure and function, is also suggested in Debra Ziegeler's paper "Redefining unidirectionality. Is there life after modality", where the author describes the trajectory of the Mandarin Chinese verb 'dé' which developed from main verb to (epistemic) modal status and lexicalized back to a main verb use. According to Ziegeler, this development cannot count as counterevidence to semantically defined unidirectionality: in the process, a "secondary 'split' from the continuing main path of grammaticalisation" (p. 126) occurred but this split is in accordance with the overall developmental cline if this cline and its lexicalization branch are integrated into a larger 'family resemblances' conceptual network. Although this is in discordance with a notion of unidirectionality as a functional-categorial universal (postulating that lexical material develops into grammatical material but not the other way round), such a lexicalization step "does not threaten the prospect of a unidirectional hypothesis as long as it can be maintained that semantic change is prior to all other changes" (p. 131). This same idea of unidirectionality being a characteristic feature of semantic change (although not necessarily of functional change) underlies the study of Foong Ha Yap, Stephen Matthews and Kaoru Horie, "From pronominalizer to pragmatic marker. Implications for unidirectionality from a crosslinguistic perspective", where the historical developmental sequences of markers in Japanese, Chinese and Malay are found to lead uniformly from inflectional (genitive marking) to pragmatic (stance-marking) functions but where the diachronic ordering of the developmental steps involved turns out to be different in each language.

The categorial change of language elements accompanied by an increasing pragmatic (subjective) value, i.e. the conception of grammaticalization as developed in the work of Elizabeth C. Traugott (e.g. 1995; cf. also Traugott & Dasher 2002), constitutes the theoretical basis of Jacqueline Visconti's contribution "Conditionals and subjectification. Implications for a theory of semantic change". The author documents the semantic-pragmatic motivation of the pathway of change of English 'suppose / supposing' and some of its Romance cognates from propositional to textual to subjective meaning, stressing that this (unproblematic) example of unidirectional semantic change should not be understood as a 'mechanical' or "deterministic process" (p. 187) but that the reason for the process is to be sought in the speakers/writers' "recruitement of 'supposing' for argumentative uses" (p. 186), which means that the driving force behind the change is discourse-pragmatic in essence. This point of view corresponds exactly to what Ulrich Detges, in "How cognitive is grammaticalization? The history of the Catalan 'perfet perifràstic'", argues to be the basis for the unexpected grammaticalization of a 'go' + infinitive periphrasis towards the expression of an aoristic past tense in this Ibero-Romance language. Detges interprets this instance of language change as a result of rhetorical strategies put to use by speakers/writers who realized that this and comparable constructions can bear a 'hot news' character which may be exploited for the purpose of textual foregrounding. "Thus, it is not the value of the source constructions as such which makes them eligible for grammaticalization, but the fact that these constructions prove to be useful for very basic communicative strategies." (p. 224) In this approach to grammaticalization, communicative need seems more prominent than cognition-based source determination or functional necessity; this reduced importance accorded to functional need is also one of the conclusions of Anastasios Tsangalidis' chapter on "Unidirectionality in the grammaticalization of modality in Greek".

Jim Miller, in his article "Perfect and resultative constructions in spoken and non-standard English", emphasizes that in evaluating grammaticalization processes, diasystematic variation must be taken into account in order to arrive at a complete and correct picture of language change. On the basis of Scottish English data he shows that the Perfect as an aspectual-temporal form that seems well established in the standard language is still in competition with other past-denoting forms in non-standard data and co- exists there with the possessive-resultative construction out of which it is supposed to have evolved. In the same vein, Lea Laitinen, under the heading "Grammaticalization and standardization", demonstrates how (language-external) standardization may, on the one hand, obscure on- going (language-internal) grammaticalization processes and, on the other, interfere with these processes and ultimately manifest a certain impact on the structural make-up of the language having undergone standardization. Her examples come from Finnish, the same language that is studied by Ilona Herlin and Lari Kotilainen who, in "External factors behind cross- linguistic similarities", question the cognitive character of language change phenomena which, at first sight, seem to be textbook-examples of universal tendencies in grammaticalization-based change and advocate - as Laitinen does - a closer look at such aspects as areal factors and language contact.

In her contribution "What constitutes a case of grammaticalization? Evidence from the development of copulas from demonstratives in Passamaquoddy", Eve Ng addresses the question how in languages with a very limited written record the fact of grammaticalization having taken place can be assessed. At the same time, she questions to a certain extent the operability of the criterion of categorical change, considered as a defining feature in many approaches to grammaticalization, by showing how intricate this question turns out to be in this Algonquian language when certain forms in verbless clauses and their status between 'demonstrative-hood' and 'copula-hood' have to be evaluated. Marian Klamer, in "Multi-categorial items as underspecified lexical entries. The case of Kambera 'wàngu'", treats a similarly problematic case in this Indonesian language and maintains that linguistic elements involved in grammaticalization chains are necessarily ambiguous as far as grammatical categorization is concerned, as the different steps of this developmental chain are located within a conceptual network organized through family resemblances (as described earlier by Ziegeler). Structural "underspecification" of these elements within an on- going grammaticalization process is considered by the author as a natural result of semantic bleaching, one of the most basic characteristics of such processes.

The problem of ambiguous functional status and multifunctionality is also addressed in Kwok-shing Wong's paper "The acquisition of polysemous forms. The case of 'bei2' ("give") in Cantonese". The author uses Chinese corpus data from the CHILDES data base to explore if diachronic changes as posited by grammaticalization research are paralleled by or reconstructable through L1 acquisitional processes, a venture that in the case of 'bei2', which has a main verb function but also additional, more grammatical functions such as dative or passive marking, turns out to be feasible. Cantonese and other isolating languages represent a certain challenge to grammaticalization research in that concurrent processes affecting the formal constitution of the linguistic elements which are being grammaticalized (and which could provide for additional evidence concerning the position on the grammaticalization chain that these elements have attained), e.g. phonetic attrition, are less readily observable in these languages.

However, Umberto Ansaldo and Lisa Lim, in "Phonetic absence as syntactic prominence. Grammaticalization in isolating tonal languages", show on the basis of examples from Cantonese and Hokkien and the results of their phonetic analysis that phenomena of phonetic erosion are well detectable in such languages, whereby "the erosion is primarily in terms of duration and vowel quality." (p. 360) In the view of the authors, these findings cast doubt on "the old adage of yesterday's syntax becoming today's morphology as universally valid" (ibid.) but do confirm the validity of the grammaticalization approach in the case of languages which lack inflectional morphology, which, in the classic accounts, is considered as the target for grammaticalizing items. These classic accounts therefore seem too narrow; this is also one of the conclusions that Sergey Say, in the concluding chapter of the book, "Grammaticalization of word order. Evidence from Lithuanian", arrives at. Say analyzes the positional options of the genitive in this Baltic language reputed to allow free word order. He finds that a positional differentiation between referential (possession- expressing) and non-referential (qualifying or classifying) genitives, which was still available in Old Lithuanian, has been leveled in the modern language, leading to a fixation of the genitive construction in preposition to the nominal head. Again, as in Herlin and Kotilainen's paper, a possible influence of language contact is taken into consideration, but more than this, system-internal aspects of functional overlap with (equally preposed) adjectives are advocated.

EVALUATION

This book is a highly recommendable read for both supporters and critics of the grammaticalization approach to language change. The impressive range of languages and phenomena on all levels of linguistic structure described and included in the volume is a reflection of the stimulating effect and the descriptive power that grammaticalization - be it as an elaborated 'theory' or as a heuristic principle - seems to have for current functional linguistics. However, as will have become evident from the synthesis of the book's contents, it is not intended as a panegyric: instead of highlighting what grammaticalization studies have achieved up to now, the volume's editors have preferred to take a rather critical stand to many key notions of this theoretical approach resp. have invited the contributors to critically examine these "seemingly unchallengeable principles" (p. 1) that have been put forward as strong hypotheses in some of the foundational work on grammaticalization. The editors expressly refer to the 2001 special issue of 'Language Sciences' (Campbell (ed.) 2001), that contained a number of critical evaluations of the validity and explanatory value of the concept of grammaticalization. Although in the present volume, Brian D. Joseph is the only representative of these critics to have contributed a paper, it becomes obvious throughout the books that the contributors have these detractors' positions in mind and that they are aiming at a debate with them, taking up and integrating into their analyses some of their arguments and refuting others.

As should have become obvious, the most controversial key concept and the one that is most broadly discussed in this volume, is unidirectionality. Although almost all the authors who mention this principle try to 'rescue' it and conclude that it continues to be a valuable notion for describing the specificities of grammaticalization-driven language change, the modifications suggested for the possible domains of its application and for the very character of the principle - as compared to early formulations such as the one by Lehmann (1995 [1982]:19, quoted by the editors on p. 2) - are far-reaching. In this respect, the terminological differentiation suggested by Haspelmath between antigrammaticalization and retraction (which obviously is not only terminological in scope but points out important differences in the way that language change phenomena evolve and pathways of grammatical change are followed) appears useful and conclusive.

Apart from this vivid discussion of the unidirectionality hypothesis, the book "Up and down the Cline" clearly illustrates the existence of different currents among the practitioners of the grammaticalization approach. These have been in existence for quite a while, with the main trends being, on the one hand side, a more form-oriented vision of grammaticalization which is mainly interested in the 'lexicon > grammar' resp. the 'syntax > morphology' cline typically associated with the work of Christian Lehmann, and, on the other, a more function-oriented approach that focuses on the 'propositional > textual > subjective' cline as developed in the work of Elizabeth C. Traugott. Although these perspectives on grammaticalization are generally looked upon as complementary rather than conflictive, is goes without saying that they imply very different approaches to the data that is taken into account, and that they yield rather different conclusions, e.g. concerning the importance accorded to universal cognition-based factors in comparison with maybe equally universal, but generally more case- specific and context-dependent discourse-pragmatic factors. This becomes obvious in the contributions by Detges (in this volume, but also in his earlier work) or by Visconti and points out the still inconclusive debate on the precise relation between intersecting concepts such as grammaticalization, lexicalization and pragmaticalization (cf., for instance, some of the contributions in Wischer & Diewald (eds.) 2001 and in Bisang, Himmelmann & Wiemer (eds.) 2004).

In addition to this, in the book under review there are a couple of original proposals concerning aspects that might play a significant role in the study of grammaticalization processes but which so far have not received the attention they deserve. Among these aspects one should range the importance of extra-linguistic factors such as language planning and standardization as described in the contributions by Laitinen and Herlin / Kotilainen, or (albeit a little less original) the consideration of areal factors and effects of language contact and interference (cf. Heine & Kuteva 2005 with further references on this subject). Another promising direction for further research might be the systematic analysis of suprasegmental features of elements supposed to have undergone or to be currently undergoing grammaticalization, as demonstrated in the contribution by Ansaldo / Lim for tonal languages but applicable - and probably highly significant - also in other, less phonization-dependent languages.

>From a formal / technical point of view, one has to acknowledge both the editors' and the publisher's solid work and high level of accuracy. Although the volume is not free of misspellings or minor layout errors (let me just mention a few of them: on p. 79, paragraph beneath examples (6) and (7): "the possessor head 'king(-es)'" should most probably read "the possessor head 'devil(-es)'"; p. 85, paragraph preceding table 2: "in German and Dutch prenominal possessives have turned into determiners but are phrase markers" should be "but are _not_ phrase markers"; p. 330, 1st paragraph, reference to Comrie (1989): this title is missing in the bibliography; p. 348, paragraph preceding example (7): "the morpheme 'gwo33' can be found suffixed to a verb as a comparative marker" should read "suffixed to an adjective"; p. 368, example (13b.) "la casa di pietro" should be "la case di pietra"), the number of typos and shortcomings of this kind is remarkably low for a 400-page book. The inclusion of a language index (listing also the grammaticalized items and constructions discussed in the respective articles), a name index and a rather detailed subject index (including again the languages treated) make this book very reader-friendly.

Claus D. Pusch is assistant professor of Romance linguistics at Albert- Ludwigs University in Freiburg (Germany). His current research interests include corpus linguistics and spoken language, the evolution and distribution of Romance imperatives and prohibitives in a grammaticalization perspective, the development of phrasal discourse markers, and the interplay of orality and standardization in Romance minority and regional languages. He is the co-founder and convenor of the triennial "Freiburg Workshop on Romance Corpus Linguistics" (3rd edition in September 2006).
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